17 February-31 March 1996:

SEARCH and CROSS-WINDS

Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup

Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup are based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. They were resident at the Experimental Art Foundation over February and March 1996 to develop two projects that were the EAF's participation in the Visual Arts program of the Telstra Adelaide Festival of Arts. These projects were called respectively SEARCH and CROSS-WINDS, and both investigated different relations between the individual and the ideas of the polis and the city. SEARCH was a project for video and broadcast TV. The artists made a synchronised walk in the city, both starting at the same time from a central point, then walking in opposite directions until they gained the further extremities of their route. This walk was followed and recorded by means of the recently installed police surveillance cameras. From this footage an edited tape was made, linking the footage of the two walkers, taken at the same time but in different places, and segmenting this into ten second sections. These sections were then broadcast on Saturday afternoon over a four week period on Channel 7 as part of the Festival TV program, interrupting the broadcast with the silent and grainy footage of the artists, and thus turning the viewers TV set into a security monitor, and allowing the viewer to see others as they themselves have been seen, should they have recently been shopping in the centre of town. This was a project that required considerable liaison and organisation, the more so, as owing to a confusion in scheduling, the first broadcast was a lot sooner than we had anticipated. In fact it gave the artists, and the EAF, a week to get the work made rather than the four weeks originally timetabled. Even this rather truncated development time wouldn't have eventuated without the Festival going into bat for this project at one point in its genesis, as two days before Pat and Wendy arrived, we still had no guaranteed access to air-time. That resolved, it would then have been impossible to get the project successfully made without the quick support of the South Australian Police, in particular the people in the surveillance room, with the help of Kevin Tischer and the support of Superintendent Ron Jackson, who moved faster than anyone had previously warned them as necessary. The Media Resource Centre were also supportive through supplying access and help at short notice. The finished work was also on show at the EAF during the exhibition, twinned with an earlier version of SEARCH made in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in association with UK-based Locus+. The CROSS-WINDS gallery work projected the EAF further into the confusing ether of broadcasting, necessitating a learning curve that was so steep that oxygen starvation was a possibility. At least with SEARCH, the artists had already effected a version, so they could foresee some of the pit-falls and anticipate the technologies required. However, CROSS-WINDS was a new project and required a month long radio broadcast, a subject on which we were all amazingly ignorant. The ignorance was not much dispersed after a first couple of days on the telephone to people such as Motorola, other than to find that walkie-talkies could not be used as the signal was a constant one. Through the murk of surplus capacities and moving wave lengths it became clear that the only option was to set up our own EAF radio station. Fortunately at this point, the clouds parted a degree and a beam of light appeared bringing illumination in the form of Jeff Langdon from Radio 5UV, described by someone at the Australian Broadcasting Authority as the Renaissance man of Australian radio. Through Jeff, we were able to locate a thirty watt Exciter, transport it from Sydney, and then navigate the complexities of getting a special event's licence from the ABA. Jeff also provided a site, found an antenna, and rigged up Exciter and antenna into an operational whole, and then jiggled it when it was found that the telephones in the Alumni Department of the University of Adelaide were picking up the signal too. All this activity was so that three extracts of opera could be travelling through the airwaves across Adelaide to be picked up by sixteen radio receivers in the EAF Gallery. The space also contained eight loud speakers that were carrying the sound of sung chords, which were abstracted and recombined from the broadcast arias. Both the arias and the broadcast music were sung by women, and the opera excerpts referred to women's narratives and stories. The orientation of the elements was determined by the idea of the 'wind-rose', a concept of Vitruvian city planning (which in turn was an influence on the vision and plan of Adelaide) in which a city should be orientated so that it blocked out the eight major and sixteen lesser winds, thus cutting out their baleful influences upon health and well-being through their effects on the humours. The Gallery was plotted out with the vectors and directions of these winds, relating them to points in Adelaide. The work conflated the physical orientation of cities with an ideological construction, substituting the voices of women for the (blocked) winds, and relating the site and position of the Gallery to the city, in a work that was both beautiful and political. An unexpected spin off from this was the discovery of quite how many people are out there scanning the airwaves in search of something new. From the day after commencing transmission of the three bits of music, the EAF was receiving at least two or three call a day, sometimes considerably more, from people with enquiries as to what was happening. Presumably these people had tracked us down via the Australian Broadcasting Authority as there was nothing on the broadcast to identify the EAF as the broadcaster. Most wanted to know the identity of the works, and who was singing, some wanted to congratulate us on setting up a station without any talking, and one caller was concerned about the health of the operator, as they had been playing the same three songs now for at least two days and were they OK?

images top to bottom: Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup

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